RUTHFULLY YOURS

One of the most repellent aspects of the 2016 presidential election has been a phenomenon that has its home in leftwing tactics but that has now emerged on the Right in addition to the Left. More precisely, it has revolved around the adoption by precincts of the #NeverTrump Right of tactics usually associated with the Left. The main feature of that tactic deploys a twofold effort at character assassination. The first step is the transformation of political disagreement into a species of heresy. The second step involves the thundering repudiation of the newly minted heretics, who are to be caricatured or demonized, and reminded that they must seek absolution or forgiveness for their apostasy.

A case in point is the New York Daily News column published two days ago by the erstwhile conservative, now Hillary Clinton supporter and #NeverTrump crusader, Gabriel Schoenfeld. “Expose Trump’s enablers,” the headline began, “How many people who should know better are making it easier for him to lie to the American people.”

Exhibit A in that roster of people “who should know better” is your humble correspondent, R. Kimball. In fact, I am the only Exhibit. My heresy is to have decided, rather late in the day, to support Donald Trump for president. Over the last couple of months, Schoenfeld has emitted several needling tweets taking me and others to task for that support. On September 17, for example, he tweeted that I, Victor Davis Hanson, and Charles Kesler were “backing a birther, a bigot, an enemy of the Constitution.” On October 1, I received a solo message: “impeccable timing for your endorsement of the lunatic, just as he implodes.” Then on October 17 we read that “If @RogerKimball, our Ezra Pound, had been born in Italy in, say, 1885, he would be singing Mussolini’s praises.” Note how the perceived pulse of the campaign affects Schoenfeld’s invective: when Trump is thought to be clearly losing, ridicule ensues; when Trump is on the upswing, paranoia and derangement follow.

Perhaps this is the place to mention that Schoenfeld and I, as he notes in his Daily News column, are acquaintances. “Encounter Press,” he writes, “published my first book.” Well, that’s nearly right. The publisher he has in mind is called Encounter Books, not Encounter Press. I should perhaps note for the record that I was not involved with Encounter when The Return of Anti-Semitism, the book to which he alludes, was published.

In a notorious 1996 New York Times essay, pundit William Safire famously said this of Hillary Clinton:

Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady – a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation – is a congenital liar.

Drip by drip, like Whitewater torture, the case is being made that she is compelled to mislead, and to ensnare her subordinates and friends in a web of deceit.

Could anyone who has followed her political activities since make any sensible rebuttal to Safire’s observation? As many of her critics have noted, Hillary Clinton will lie when she’d be far better served by the truth. Now here we are just days away from an election that could put this woman into the most powerful political position in the world, and apparently she’s still at it.

Conservative site, 100% Fed Up, is reporting this (emphasis added):

Campaigning in Florida on Tuesday, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton claimed that she was in New York City on 9/11, when terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center. She made her claim while discussing terrorism and the threat posed by ISIS.”I know what happened not far from here at Pulse night club in Orlando,” she said. “I was in New York City on 9/11 as one of the two senators. I will defeat ISIS. I will protect America.”

Except that she wasn’t in New York City on 9/11; she was at her home in Washington, D.C. on the morning of that day of infamy and did not get to New York until the next day. Proof of her silly, useless lie is available from her own campaign media operation, the Clinton News Network, which in a 15-year commemoration of 9/11 featuring Clinton said this:

When news broke of the first plane ripping through the north tower of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, Clinton had just left her house in Washington, D.C., and was on her way to the Senate. By the time she reached Capitol Hill, evacuations were already underway.

Good grief! The woman is running for the nation’s highest office, and mere days before the election, she gratuitously lies to a crowd of supporters? Even the most naive political beginner would know that you don’t publicly lie about something that can be so easily checked. Had Hillary not been lying for so long, as Safire documents, we might attribute such a gaffe to the various head injuries she’s sustained or as a mental manifestation of the Parkinson’s disease some physicians suspect her to have. But no, her previous history all the way back to pre-Safire argues persuasively that this is one of those people whom many of us have met, and most of us have heard of, a person who simply can’t sort out truth from lies in her own mind and her own mouth. She will, in clear fact, lie when the truth would be to her advantage, as in Florida Tuesday.

Hillary Clinton is, quite clearly, a congenital liar. But here’s the sobering thought to take away from this: if she can’t separate truth from lies, is she also incapable of distinguishing between honest and dishonest behavior? Her behavior as secretary of state would seem to indicate the answer is no, she can’t.

And I ask you again today, folks: is this the kind of person we want leading our America?

In June of 2014, the Washington Free Beacon came upon an audiotape of then first lady of Arkansas Hillary Clinton from the 1980’s discussing with journalist Roy Reed a legal case she had been involved with in 1975. She had been the defense attorney for Thomas Alfred Taylor, who at age 41 had been accused of raping a 12 year-old girl in May of that year.

On the audio, Hillary, in an affected southern drawl, could be heard laughing at several inappropriate times. “He took a lie detector test,” she said. “I had him take a polygraph, which he passed, which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs (laughs).” Then Hillary spoke about a section of Taylor’s underwear that was now missing where authorities had done a DNA match from what was found on the 12-year old while in the hospital. Hillary told Reed that she had flown to Brooklyn to receive an expert legal opinion in the case, and later told Washington County (Arkansas) Prosecutor Mahlon Gibson that “this guy’s ready to come from New York to prevent a miscarriage of justice (laughs).”

The tape concluded with Reed asking Hillary how the case turned out. “Oh, he plea bargained! Got him off for time served in the county jail, he’d been in the county jail about two months.”

The Free Beacon also found legal filings from the case, where Hillary had made accusations about the rape victim. In July, Hillary had asked for a psychiatric examination of the 12-year old and then filed an affidavit, essentially tarnishing the victim, saying that she was “emotionally unstable.” Hillary also added that she “had a tendency to seek out older men to engage in fantasizing.”

Her attacks in the affidavit continued. “I have been informed that she has in the past made false accusations about persons, claiming that they had attacked her body.” Hillary added that children from broken homes are “prone to such behavior.”

Taylor was initially indicted for rape, where he could have received a life sentence, but Hillary was successful at “pleading down” the case to illegal fondling of a minor. Taylor was sentenced to five years in prison, with four years suspended. He was to serve 12 months in the Washington County jail in Fayetteville, with two months suspended for the time he had already served. But the outcome would end up being something far shorter.

After the tape was made public two years ago, the Free Beacon tracked the victim down, but she refused to speak to the reporter, Alana Goodman. Daily Beast reporter Josh Rogin contacted her next, and he wrote an article about her terrifying experience. She also made an audio recording, and her name and image were deliberately not included. After hearing the tape, the victim, now in her 50’s, said about Hillary, “You lied on me…I realize the truth now, the heart of what you’ve done to me. And you’re supposed to be for women?”

Every cable network picked up the story and many major websites also did at the time. Hillary finally addressed the issue saying that “in our system you have an obligation, and once I was appointed I fulfilled that obligation.” Nothing more was reported until May of this year, when Rogin told CNN, “T here’s never been any evidence presented by anyone to substantiate the allegations that Hillary Clinton made in that affidavit.”

Our resident soothsayer has examined the entrails of the US presidential campaign, now in its final days, and laid out his prophecies. While some might seem highly unlikely, there can be no doubt the Clinton Foundation’s coffers will swell mightily.
Barring the FBI’s various and ongoing investigations, the US seems likely to elect its first female President next week. What do deplorable basket-case right-wingers have to look forward to, should Republican contender Donald Trump’s last-minute firming in the polls prove stillborn? Let’s peer into the crystal ball.

January’s inaugural speech will begin with the sound of tinkling as the glass ceiling finally shatters and disintegrates, showering the assembled glitterati with extra sparkle. Ms Clinton will likely say she will strive to be a President for all Americans, especially transgender Islamists and anyone else who contributes generously to the Clinton Foundation.

By February she will be back in her snowy hometown of Chicago to lay a foundation stone for the city’s new desalination plant, which the Windy City doesn’t actually need as it is located on the shores of Lake Michigan. But that doesn’t mean much in Cook County, where public works projects and budgets have always been regarded as the treasury of the connected. Why, even grandmas get in on the act!

In March, Hillary hits Laredo, on the Mexican border, to open her fast-track, solar-powered mass immigration travelator, installed across the Rio Grande to safely bring in ten of thousands of new Americans per hour. “As racist imperialists stole Texas in the first place, the day has come never again to vex a Mex.” The new arrivals will be added to the electoral rolls without delay, especially in congressional districts now occupied by Republicans.

In early April, she will personally greet walkers in the Million Grandma March in Washington. Hubby Bill will welcome many of the assembled grannies with warm and enthusiastic hugs — mostly, but not exclusively, of the non-staining variety.

Come May, Hillary will be in Nevada to pull the plug on the no-longer-mighty mighty Hoover Dam. As she presses the button to demolish the dam wall, Hillary asks “Who are we to stop this mighty river from doing as Gaia intended?” Later that day, in order to re-assure Las Vegas residents that their city will still light the night with its neon incandesence now that the hydro power is no more, she opens the nation’s first urine-powered turbine.

In June, Hillary visits US troops as they leave Germany to make way for the new Islamist peace-keeping force. “Ich bin eine halal Frankfurter!” she says to thunderous applause. Mysteriously large sums, denominated in Gulf State petro dollars, pour into the Clinton Foundation’s coffers. The only down note comes when she regrets daughter Chelsea will be unable to attend New Year’s revelries at Cologne Station, but nevertheless wishes all participants the very best for that celebration of multicultural enrichment.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/441636/print

Before Democrats burn James Comey in effigy, they should think about how the FBI director came to have an outsized influence in the election in the first place.

It’s not something Comey sought or welcomed. A law-enforcement official who prizes his reputation, he didn’t relish becoming an object of hate for half the country or more. No, the only reason that Comey figures in the election at all is that Democrats knowingly nominated someone under FBI investigation.

Once upon a time — namely any presidential election prior to this one — this enormous political and legal vulnerability would have disqualified a candidate. Not this year, and not in the case of Hillary Clinton.

The country has clearly lowered its standards in this election, and Donald Trump’s madcap candidacy provides evidence of that almost every day. But Hillary’s nomination was itself an offense against American political norms and an incredibly reckless act. And the Democrats were supposed to be the party acting rationally.

Clinton effectively locked up the nomination in June and wasn’t cleared of criminal wrongdoing by the FBI until July. What if she had been indicted? Would Democrats have run her anyway? Would they have substituted in a 74-year-old socialist who had lost the nomination battle, or someone else who hadn’t even run? Any of these circumstances would have been unprecedented, but Democrats risked it.

They did it, in part, because they could never bring themselves to fully acknowledge the seriousness of the e-mail scandal and, relatedly, the ethical miasma around the Clinton Foundation. They considered it all another desperate trick of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.

Clinton henchman David Brock demanded that the New York Times retract its initial report of Clinton’s exclusive use of a private e-mail account in March 2015. A parade of Democratic operatives pooh-poohed the whole thing, from Clinton spokesman Karen Finney (“a politically motivated series of attacks”), to James Carville (“not going to amount to a hill of beans”), to Howard Dean (“hooey”).

When they first got together on a debate stage last October, Bernie Sanders, the only man who had a chance to stop Clinton, pleased the crowd with a ringing denunciation of interest in her e-mails.

Democrats bought the just-so stories offered up by the Clinton campaign. The FBI investigation was just a “security review.” The FBI wasn’t investigating Hillary, but only her server. Anything to deflect from the seriousness of the matter.

While Democrats willfully looked the other way, they put James Comey in an impossible position. An indictment would change the course of American history. That was all on him. He ultimately blinked. But he also put on the record the recklessness of Clinton’s practices as secretary of state in an attempt to create public accountability.

Comey’s conduct is open to criticism, but there is no way to please everyone when handling an investigation with such high political stakes. His notification to Congress last weekend is another case in point. All that can be said is that if Democrats didn’t want the FBI to have any part in the election, they could have considered that before handing Hillary Clinton their nomination.

Trump may be a deeply flawed candidate, but he caught a wave of popular fervor; Hillary, with her astonishing vulnerabilities, is a production of the Democratic elites who did everything to get her over the finish line.

Just how vulnerable is she? If it weren’t for the new trove of Huma Abedin e-mails, the blockbuster news this week would come via a Wall Street Journal report that the FBI is investigating the Clinton Foundation — although Fox News reported the same thing at the beginning of the year, and Hillary, of course, dismissed it as an “unsourced and irresponsible claim that has no basis.”

The e-mail scandal and Clinton Foundation will dog Hillary until Election Day and, should she win, into her presidency. For this, she has no one to blame but herself — and her irresponsible enablers.

— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. © 2016 King Features Syndicate

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/441688/print

Will there be an eleventh-hour Never/Against/No Trump Reconsideration?

The question gains new relevance as a Hillary Clinton landslide, widely predicted until recently, now seems unlikely.

We are back to the razor’s edge, a likelihood of a close one- to three-point victory either way, and an even closer vote in the Electoral College. Once again, eyes focus on the Never Trump camp. It is at a crux, no doubt feeling schadenfreude that in extremis Donald Trump would beckon to them, of all people, with his “come home” campaign, while they are uneasy that his home-stretch themes, despite all the scary talk of a new exclusionary nationalism, nonetheless reflect most of the positions of their own mainstream conservatism.

The more inept Clinton, Inc. — shrill, ad hominem, and conspiratorial — becomes on the stump, oddly, the calmer Trump finally campaigns — again, prompting the question of whether enough Never or Against Trumpers will have second thoughts that might help Trump win close swing states such as North Carolina, Colorado, or Nevada. In other words, will watching the spiraling Clinton criminality and shamelessness finally drive some anti-Trump conservatives to hold their nose and vote Trump? Will enough conclude that a conservative in a swing state sitting out or voting for a symbolic candidate is a de facto sanction of an agenda that they have spent most of their lives opposing?

RELATED: The Case for Trump

Trump and Pence both have recently given impressive issues-orientated speeches. In contrast, an exasperated Hillary Clinton keeps resorting to Jimmy Carter’s 1980 tactic of demonizing the Republican nominee as dangerous, ill-tempered, and existentially reckless — without much interest in reminding supporters of the supposed benefits of her own progressive agenda. Her campaign is being reduced to unimaginative but familiar Clinton boilerplate: Trump is a bad guy, and the formerly sterling FBI director, James Comey, is now a corrupt Trump partisan. At the end, who thought that Trump would be subdued and campaigning on the issues, and the supposedly cool professional politico Clinton reduced to frenetic smears and conspiracies? Otherwise, Clinton apparently believes that, after her motor blew up this past weekend, the Democratic campaign boat can still coast to shore just ahead of a rapidly closing Trump. She could be right.

For all the talk of buffoonery versus criminality, the divide, at least in November 2016, is over issues and ostensibly could not be clearer for both conservatives and liberals.

On the Supreme Court, Obamacare, the debt, rebuilding the military, the Second Amendment, school choice, abortion, reforming the tax code, reexamining regulation, energy exploration and production, illegal immigration, sanctuary cities, and a host of other issues, the Republican ticket is the antithesis of Clinton/Kaine — and is recognized as such by nearly all progressives. Unlike the Democratic prospect, the conservative message oddly still has the chance of being empowered by both Houses of Congress and eventually a Supreme Court.

WikiLeaks, the DNC revelations, the FBI investigations, the Podesta trove, etc., all remind voters in this lowball campaign that Clinton is not a more moral and ethical candidate than Trump, whatever his flaws and shortcomings. And the world we glimpse in John Podesta e-mails is an accurate reflection of the values and interests that created and enriched the Clintons and that would continue their insidious influence in a second Clinton presidency. Remember that the Clinton remorse, such as it is, is not over graft and sabotage of the law and high office but merely over having their habitual corruption exposed. The weird case of Anthony Weiner’s e-mails completed the Clinton circle from immorality to farce, as hubris earned Nemesis — who, remember, always arrives late and in strange incarnations.

It is said that the election poses risks. In fact, in the sense of uncertainty, it does not, at least in the case of Hillary Clinton: There is no mystery at all. Her long record, campaign, published platform, and solidarity with Barack Obama would ensure a twelve-year era of continuing left-wing court appointees, as well as a likely single-payer rescue for the failed Obamacare, more debt incurred for entitlements, a shrinking and more politicized military, more efforts to prune the Second Amendment, no to school choice, expansion of abortion opportunities, more hidden higher taxes on the middle classes and more overt higher taxes on the upper-middle classes, more regulations on small business, more tribal divisiveness, open borders, sanctuary cities and amnesties, crony-green capitalism, and a continued war on fossil fuels. And, of course, there will be endless investigations, more ruined lives of obsequious subordinates, more attacks on prosecutors and the FBI, plea bargains, and scandals as leaks just keep leaking — and always more white lies like her recent false assertion that James Comey wrote his reinvestigation letter only to Republicans.

Clinton’s only remaining advantage is Democratic unity in comparison with the minority party’s fragmentation. Strangely, the supposedly idealist Bernie Sanders, who is the victim of deliberate Clinton-inspired sabotage and subterfuge, in a way that was not paralleled during the Republican primaries, has no compunction about rallying his base to support Hillary. In contrast, Trump’s uncouthness has turned off his rivals and their supporters, who still in large part insist that they will not support him despite the transparency of the primaries and the long-ago oath of fealty of the Republican candidates to the eventual nominee.

The election could depend on how many center-right Republican moderates and independents decide that Hillary’s left-wing visions of a 21st-century America and her innate criminality finally become too much to endure, and how many at last demand her retirement from politics.

If 300,000 to 400,00 apostates in three or four swing states feel that way over the weekend, and come home, she would be finished.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.

As demonstrated by both Trump and Sanders, a key feature in the 2016 US election has been a populist narrative about how foreign governments and companies, in cahoots with political and institutional insiders, have wrought ruin upon the nation.
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has endured two populist insurrections over the past eighteen months, one from the Left and the other from the Right. Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have played the populist card, a conviction that ordinary men and women have been rorted by “the system” and that strong decisive action was required on behalf of regular folk to take back control of the nation from a coterie of cronies. The populist’s worldview is invariably a Manichean one of blameless “outsiders”—in alliance with a would-be political saviour—fighting the good fight against the “wicked insiders”. Sanders’s gripe was the state’s failure to safeguard the little person; Trump’s grievance is much the same, albeit for mostly different reasons.

A populist movement is a function of voters going rogue after deciding that the political status quo has lost its legitimacy—in the American case, the customary policies of the Democratic Party and the customary policies of the Republican Party. Populist revolts in America have emerged before at times of stress, from the People’s Party of James B. Weaver in the 1890s to the “Share the Wealth” movement of the Great Depression, the latter cut short by Huey Long’s assassination in 1935. Jack Ross, writing for the American Conservative in March 2016, insisted that Sanders’s politics should be seen as a contemporary version of Huey Long’s proletarian-flavoured radicalism rather than in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt-style liberalism and Henry Wallace’s progressivism or, we might add, Barack Obama’s New Left-style identity politics. Ross rationalises Sanders’s recourse to the middle-class identity politics of Black Lives Matter as the exception rather than the rule. For the most part, then, Senator Sanders differentiated himself from Hillary Clinton in his populist morality tale by implicitly casting her as the establishment candidate, an insider compromised by long and intimate association with “Wall Street speculators”.

Bernie Sanders, fittingly enough, kicked off his primary campaign by refusing to set up a Super PAC (political action committee) as proof that shady plutocrats and their Washington accomplices could not buy off the aspiring people’s hero. He was free to remain an independent operator and, presumably, the champion of outsiders. Central to his populist narrative was that an overclass had subverted democracy in America; decisions were being made that profited powerful oligarchical interests by selling out ordinary American workers, the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Barack Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) being two obvious cases in point.

Sanders’s self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” insurgency also drew on a pervasive bitterness at the wage and wealth inequality in the modern-day US. Accordingly, Sanders’s policy rollout began with a range of government-guaranteed benefits for ordinary workers, from a new minimum wage to longer holidays. Sanders also pledged full remission on student-debt loans and a $70 billion plan to make tertiary education free. It was payback time for the outsiders.

Five weeks before the November 8 election an audiotape (dating back to a March 2016 fundraiser in Virginia) emerged of Hillary Clinton dismissing Bernie Sanders’s supporters as ill-informed Millennials who believed America should have “free college, health care” and that the Obama administration had not “gone far enough” in transforming the United States into “Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what that means”. However, as Sanders’s campaign was surging at the time, Hillary Clinton entered into a bidding war with her rival. For instance, she promised a $250 billion infrastructure upgrade, only for Bernie Sanders to top this with a $1 trillion undertaking, throwing in high-speed internet access for rural America as a bonus. Why not? Add to that, of course, his plan for universal health care (or so-called Berniecare), a single-payer health plan that Sanders himself acknowledged would increase annual government spending on health from $1 trillion to $2.9 trillion. A Sanders presidency would have likely seen the resentments of the Occupy Wall Street movement to “the greed of corporate America” become the de facto creed of the White House.

Such was the appeal of Bernie Sanders’s leftist version of “the system is rigged” that he garnered almost 39 per cent of Democratic delegates in the primaries, possibly his most surprising victory being the March 8 victory in Michigan. In fact, he collected 46 per cent of delegates if “superdelegates”—party-appointed delegates not elected in primaries or caucuses—are excluded from the count. This was not the only way in which Democratic Party apparatchiks worked in favour of the establishment’s candidate. On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, held in Philadelphia, WikiLeaks revealed that the leadership of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had conspired against Sanders from the beginning. For instance, some of the 20,000 leaked e-mails show that the DNC considered making Sanders’s Jewish background a campaign issue in some states. There was also evidence of collusion between the DNC and the Washington Post in the interests of the Clinton campaign. These troubling revelations forced DNC chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign but, tellingly, immediately afterwards she was hired by the Clinton campaign.